Any social movement needs inspiration. It needs people who can imagine a different future and, more than that, make that future graspable.
Kate Jennings did that for the Australian women’s movement with her incandescent anger, her sharp tongue and her courage, ready and able to speak straight into the face of power. Her death, in New York aged 72, offers a moment to reflect on the role of writers and literature as forces of social transformation.
many women are beginning to feel the necessity to speak for themselves, for their sisters.
i feel that necessity now.
When Jennings lined up for her turn to speak at a Vietnam moratorium rally on the lawns of Sydney University in 1970, she was a half-drop-out from Sydney’s English Department, living in Glebe.